Thoughts on Google IO 2017

I spent this entire week in the west coast attending North America GDG Managers’ Summit and the I/O events. I am still processing some of the conversations from the Managers’ summit and how to use them to improve GDG Philadelphia that I help run so I’ll leave that to a future blog post so this post is restricted to the I/O event only.

The list of announcements both big and small are a mile long and have been well covered by other publications. My own gist of the announcements is here (feel free to send me a pull request if you wanna add anything there). Here are some thoughts on just I/O this year:

AI All the Things

Google’s internal things to pepper their products with features only possible using AI is clearly bearing fruit. From just pure utility features like enhanced copy and paste on Android to flagship features like Google Lens that allows object recognition in photos and videos on Google Photo and Assistant. I am particularly excited by the TensorflowLite project and programming for AI is something I am going to learn this year.

Immersive Computing (VR / AR / MR / xR)

People seem to love coming up with new terminology in this space. Google buckets the VR/AR technologies into “Immersive Computing”. They are doing some really interesting things in this space and I am glad to see them continue to push the state of art here. I was particularly impressed by Project Seurat that uses algorithms to allow developers to use simpler geometry to mimic complex, even movie quality, 3D models.

On the Tango / Augmented Reality side, Google Visual Positioning System truly impresses as well. In fact in one conversation, a Googler mentioned that the Google Maps team was heavily involved in the VPS development.

Visualization of a how a VPS (visual positioning service) map gets generated. This map of a Lowe's store has 10M+ feature points in it. pic.twitter.com/QMEkBIOtXY

Chatbase, Google’s analytics platform for Chatbots that lets you observe your bots’ growth and engagement over time

I liked the system and it seems pretty trivial to make a simple Chatbot…I mean Action. They also announced a competition for the platform so get ready to see a lot of new ways you can order pizzas 😉

Android Dev

Android SDK + Firebase

Google continues to push Firebase as an essential part of Android development. Google cloud services have been catching up to AWS’ for a while and Firebase seems to be a great option to AWS Mobile. AWS’ tools are not friendly to a mobile developer and the Firebase tools do seem much more approachable. The addition of services like Performance Monitoring makes Firebase even more essential a part of the Android developers’ toolkit.

Google Play Developer Console Updates

I haven’t pushed anything to the Google Play Store since Picscribe in 2013. The publisher tools back then were functional and did a decent job I thought, but the latest updates to the publisher experience are fantastic. More tools to run A/B tests, greater visibility on top reasons for crashes, pre-release testing etc will allow developers to really optimize their apps just from the store.

Kotlin is an official second language for Android development

I am mostly ambivalent about Kotlin (😱). I had no particular issues with using Java for Android development, except maybe an occasional gripe about not being able to pass functions around. I am happy for Kotlin’s less verbose syntax but dread what happened with Swift’s introduction to the iOS ecosystem where the focus seemed to change from cool apps to various academic discussions (if I hear about monads one more time…).

Also the rapid evolution of the language meant that code examples and Stack Overflow answers stopped working in a few months. Lets hope this is less of an issue on the Android side.

And of course a new developer moving to Android now needs to know not only Java but Kotlin as well since the codebase will be a mix of the two.

On the flip side, the copy Java and paste as Kotlin feature in Android Studio is pretty dope

Cloud Functions: The rise of Lambdas

With so much functionality exposed as services from either Google or Amazon, developers can really power their apps with very little backend code development. That said, this leads to the rise in the need for some kind of glue layer that connects all these components together. Firebase’ Cloud Functions and Amazon’s Lambdas serve this need. The workflow for Amazon Lambdas is still slightly awkward, but Firebase’s workflow feels a lot better.

Final thoughts

There were a lot for cool technologies for show at I/O and it was awesome. The other amazing part was just meeting old friends from across the world and even making some new ones.

I will also say this: This was one of the BEST organized events I have ever attended and kudos to Google for pulling it off. The session reservation system worked well, there was ample shade, food and drink and even they even got the weather to be nice for 3 days 😉

Till next year!

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Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Software Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on Virtual and Augmented Reality as well as investigating Blockchains and the decentralized internet.
View all posts by Arpit Mathur